Reminds me of the letter Babbage wrote to Tennyson, correcting his poem:
"In your otherwise beautiful poem one verse reads,
Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born
If this were true the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest that the next edition of your poem should read:
Every moment dies a man
Every moment 1 1/16 is born
Strictly speaking the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."
Actually a moment is an infinitesimally small amount of time, therefore in order to model the birth/death distribution across moments we need to rigorously define... wait, what am I doing with my life?!
"In your otherwise beautiful poem one verse reads,
Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born
If this were true the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest that the next edition of your poem should read:
Every moment dies a man Every moment 1 1/16 is born
Strictly speaking the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry."
Seems jgc has written a blog about it:
http://blog.jgc.org/2010/09/on-being-nerd.html